Written for the LSWA
You just think college athletes do a lot of bouncing around from school to school these days.
It turns out the transfer portal is not just for athletes.
Take Glenn Guilbeau, for instance.
The New Orleans native, Metairie to be exact, was living the portal life long before it became fashionable — long before he ended up covering the constant hop-skip-and-jumping of college athletes.
It is now officially a Hall of Fame journey, as Guilbeau will be inducted in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame during the annual ceremony in Natchitoches.
Few on the journalism side took a longer and more winding road there, although most of it has at least been based in Baton Rouge, covering LSU’s always-wild sports scene.
He first tested the portal in college, attending LSU as a freshman in 1979-80, UNO for a year, then transferring to Missouri, then back to LSU and finally finishing at Mizzou in the summer of 1983. While at LSU, he interned in sports information office under legendary SID Paul Manasseh.
Diploma in hand, the bouncing around began.
It started back in Baton Rouge working for Tiger Rag before moving on to — you’ll need to take a deep breath here — the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, Slidell Sentry News, Alexandria Town Talk, Mobile (Ala.) Press-Register, back to Baton Rouge at The Advocate, then Gannett Louisiana (based in Baton Rouge) covering LSU for the chain’s numerous state newspapers. Then he became a national columnist at OutKick.com/FOX News, and, finally, now back where it all started at Tiger Rag.
Feel free to exhale.
But that’s a guy who was never afraid to try new jobs, new places, new offices, new bosses.
New challenges.
“It has always been a lot of fun and adventure to leave a job, preferably on your own, and start a new one,” Guilbeau says. “First you get a going-away party, then you’re the new guy. Everything’s fresh.”
There was something to be said for all of them.
Most of them, you’ll note, were based in Baton Rouge, and there is one constant throughout this varied career.
It doesn’t matter where he works or which team or sport he covers, readers are going to get Guilbeau Unfiltered.
It doesn’t always endear him to fans, but he knows no other way.
What he sees, is what he’s going to write. What he truly believes, is the opinion you’re going to read in his columns.
None of this fluff stuff. Don’t expect any sugar-coating.
He just doesn’t play that silly game, doesn’t tip-toe around any subject, can’t worry about how many feathers he might ruffle in the process.
“I always wanted to be a columnist more than a reporter,” he says. “Writing opinions doesn’t lend itself to long relationships with people at the school or on the team.”
Translation: If the home team messes up, he’s going to point it out. If the coach made a bad game-day decision — and they do on occasion — that coach will read about it in the next day’s newspaper.
Fan-boy message boards can (and sometimes do) torch him all they want.
It might surprise some of them to know that Guilbeau is universally well received by his colleagues in a competitive business with no shortage of egos.
He’s the kind of guy who, learning that a fellow LSU beat writer was hospitalized in Houston at the same time LSU baseball was scheduled to play Rice, alerted Jay Johnson and suggested that the LSU coach pay the patient a visit (he did).
One of these moons Guilbeau might give a big hoot in Havana that he sometimes gets under his readers’ skin. Or that he’s had some minor feuds with famous coaches and school administrators over the years.
Some, probably most, do get it.
“While I have not always agreed with his opinions, he always backs up his thoughts with viable information,” says Herb Vincent, LSU’s long-time SID who is now an associate commissioner of the Southeastern Conference.
Coincidentally, Vincent will be inducted the same night as Guilbeau in Natchitoches as this year’s winner of the Dave Dixon Louisiana Sports Leadership Award.
Vincent continues: “Glenn does not cater to the fan message boards and he doesn’t shy away from expressing an unpopular opinion. He has always been thorough in his reporting and is not afraid to ask the tough question.”
The thing is, Guilbeau figures the teams have try-outs for cheerleaders, none of which he signed up for.
“I believe that for every 10 fans who get pissed, there is one who loves it,” Guilbeau says. “LSU fans — more than any other fan base, I believe — have more of an edge to them. They’re always on the brink of turning on the Tigers because LSU historically has had so many ups and downs and football coaching turnover.”
He’ll do it on his own “Guilbeau Time” as “fashionably late” is one of his many endearing trademarks. But he’s never missing anything important, like deadline.
And, often as not, he’ll be one of the last ones in the press box, done with his deadline story but already covering every angle for the next story.
Guilbeau can churn out some copy. He is all about the job.
In fact, even his marriage to the former Michelle Millhollon is your classic love story fit for an old, black-and-white journalism movie, filled with intrigue, coincidence and at least one little white lie.
It was set in Omaha in 2000.
Guilbeau, of course, was covering the Tigers’ baseball team in the College World Series.
Michelle, now communications director for the Louisiana Teachers Retirement Association, at the time was one of the state’s top court reporters with The Advocate (and the news ink still runs through her veins).
She admittedly knows little and cares less about sports but was also up in Omaha from The Advocate’s news side, sending back daily dispatches from the LSU fan and tailgate scene.
She had just recently watched and covered an Angola prison execution for the paper. The editors thought it would be good for her to go cover some lighter fare.
Perfect timing.
Glenn was already smitten with her before both ended up in Omaha. Up there she hung out after hours a little with The Advocate’s sports writers and photographers.
So before the national championship game, Glenn told her about an Irish pub in Omaha’s Old Market area where he, columnist Scott Rabalais and some staffers were going to belly-up for postgame fellowship.
Funny thing, but when she showed up, Glenn was the only one from the Advocate crew there.
It was part of a diabolical Guilbeau plan — Rabalais was even in on it, later corroborating the lie that he and the others had something come up that kept them away.
It worked.
Long story short: While the Tigers won the last of Skip Bertman’s five national championships — Guilbeau’s most enjoyable team of the multitude he’s covered — it turned out that Glenn and Michelle made a pretty good team themselves.
“We started dating when we got back to Baton Rouge,” Glenn says.
He actually won twice that day — his story from the championship game took a first place in that year’s Louisiana Sports Writers Association contest.
He’s got too many of those plaques to count, a wall full of national awards, too.
Maybe his finest achievement, however, came when The Advocate put out a special section on Bertman’s final season as head coach in 2001.
It was a veritable book in itself, and Guilbeau wrote virtually all of the stories for it.
It won a national award from the Associated Press Sports Editors.
Maybe it also set up the perfect rebut to those who wonder how he got along with all those coaches.
Years later, when Bertman needed someone to author the book on his fabulous LSU career, he chose Guilbeau to write “Everything Matters in Baseball.”
“Skip was fantastic to work with,” Guilbeau says, “It was like those days when he was in Omaha at practice, just sitting in the dugout talking to reporters while barely watching practice. Fantastic memory for details. Great story teller.”
And Guilbeau was there to re-tell them.
Like many in his trade, Guilbeau grew up loving sports, but it was more the journalism that kept him going after he got up close and personal to the former.
As a kid in Metairie, he rode his bike to the Saints’ training camp practices, and when his father Baker Guilbeau’s season tickets arrived each year he devoured the media guide that came with them. He always got fooled into thinking might be be good — was always disappointed and probably never dreamed he’d one day cover the Saints’ Super Bowl victory in 2010.
He also played youth baseball as a good field/no-hit shortstop. He’s still a life-long Houston Astros fan — not to worry, no fan-boy conflict there since he doesn’t cover them (and stays off their message boards).
But his mother, Carmen, was the librarian at Rummel High School, and even before he was a student there, he was poring over the newspapers she collected — the big-city stuff from New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, etc.
Then one week his dad took him to a series of lectures at Loyola University, where John Jones and the late Marty Mule´, then of the Times-Picayune sports staff, were the speakers.
“I thought it was really cool,” he says, not knowing at the time that one day he’d be joining that duo and other scribes for the informal post-game football warm-downs to hash out games with the LSU coaches.
“I thought it would be fun to cover sports for a living. It wouldn’t be like working … or so I thought.”
Yet it all started with a love affair with the Saints and Astros — both awful during his formative years.
“Consistently, yearly, the worst two teams on the planet,” he remembers.
Perhaps that explains why his prose wanders into the negative from time to time.
“I haven’t talked to a psychologist about this,” he laughs. “But maybe I should.”
Scooter Hobbs has been entertaining and informing sports fans at the Lake Charles American Press since 1979 and as a columnist with Tiger Rag Magazine. Noted across the South for his coverage of LSU football, baseball and men’s basketball, Hobbs has been named LSWA Sportswriter of the Year and Columnist of the Year on numerous occasions. A former LSWA president, he is a 2018 Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame inductee as a Distinguished Service Award in Sports Journalism winner.
— LaSportsHall.com —